[msundman]

Originally Posted by Teyrnon

Well, the basic unit of language is arguably the word.

That's indeed very arguable. E.g. it's definitely not sensible to count the Finnish word "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän " as 1 unit, as it's composed of over 10 suffix units altering the meaning of its base.

Originally Posted by Teyrnon

Sure words are different lengths but it does average out. Character count isn't reflective of the language nor does it really give a good idea of speed. Speed readers in particular tend to read words as discrete entities whether that word is 1 character long or 9 the word is read at the same speed.

I doubt that's correct. Although it's true that words are usually read whole, it's also true that longer words usually take longer to read than shorter words. AFAIK people almost completely "jump over" (i.e., the eye movement doesn't slow down significantly at) very short words, such as "a", when they read.

If speed readers would read every word equally fast then Finnish speed readers would finish books in considerably less time, but AFAIK this is not the case. AFAIK the number of characters more accurately reflects both the length of the text and the speed with which it's read.

Originally Posted by Teyrnon

Character count tells me nothing useful about the text, word count atleast gives me an idea of how long it is in meaningful units of language.

Certainly characters are meaningful units of character-based languages, so I don't know what you're getting at.

Originally Posted by Teyrnon

Also, word count produces more manageable values. I'd rather talk about a 150,000 word novel rather than a 1.1 megabyte novel.

With SI-prefixes pretty much any size is as manageable as any other size. E.g., "123 kX" is as easy as "123 TX" to handle, even though the latter is 1,000,000,000 times as large.

And nobody suggested "byte" as anything meaningful in this sense so that "megabyte" thing is a straw man.

Originally Posted by Teyrnon

By the way, your 1K=1 Page figure seems a little odd. 1K in English works out to about 150 words. That's a really tiny page. If I'm not mistaken the average pocket size paperback is about 500 words to a page.

You're right, 1 kchar pages are very small. E.g., my Ender's Game pocket is 380 pages (and the pages are quite small) and has 453 kchars (and 107 kwords). I still think it's close enough, though. A 500 kchar book would be 500 very small pages or 250 large(ish) pages. No matter which of the page sizes you want to go with the conversion between it and kchars is very easy to do in your head.